Fortune magazine recently published an article on The new thing on campus: Why universities are appointing their first chief AI officers, now known as CAIOs. In describing the trend, the article quoted the CAIOs from George Mason University, UCLA, the University of Utah, and UMBC, which appointed Professor Anupam Joshi as its Chief AI Officer and Vice Provost in June 2025.
Joshi, who joined UMBC as an Assistant Professor in 1998, started working on AI and neural networks as a graduate student at Purdue in the early 1990s. His research has continued to use a broad range of evolving AI concepts and systems to a variety of problems in different application domains, including cybersecurity, healthcare, social media, pervasive computing systems, high-performance computing, and multi-agent systems. Here’s an excerpt from the Fortune article.
“Anupam Joshi had served as CAIO for less than a month at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County when he spoke to Fortune. He shares that the school’s leadership had realized that AI had been generating excitement beyond the typical areas of computer and information science. … As he settles into his new work, Joshi says he’s exploring research partnerships that can be extended with companies like Google and Microsoft, while also listening to how professors want to utilize and teach AI. Many college professors are already using AI in their work, at times to the consternation of the students they teach. Joshi says teachers also tend to be a vocal crowd that isn’t shy about sharing their scholarly opinions.
“I think whoever comes into these kinds of roles needs to start with the position of humility,” says Joshi. “Because it’s one thing to do your own research in AI, trying to push the state of the art, and it’s another thing to use that as a tool to transform enterprises.”
UMBC CWIT alumna Wendy Bickersteth will give an online talk on Existing Risks of Generative AI and Surveying Public Perceptions on Friday, September 5, 2025, from 11am-12pm EDT. She is currently a Societal Computing PhD student at the Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Security and Privacy Institute.
Working with Dr. Lorrie Cranor, she conducts research on usable privacy and security, focusing on privacy labels and the use of AI. Read more about this work in this recent paper.
Join the online event via this WebEx link.
UMBC professor Houbing Song and PhD student Safayat Bin Hakim will give a free online webinar on Neuro-symbolic AI: The Third Wave of AI, at 8:00am EDT on Thursday, 26 September 2025. The webinar is part of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) Young Professionals Society "Inspire the Next Generation with IEEE IES SYP Forum and Webinar Series".
There are three waves of Artificial Intelligence. The first Wave of AI is Crafted Knowledge, which includes rule-based AI systems. The second wave of AI is Statistical Learning, which includes machines becoming intelligent by using statistical methods. The third wave of AI is contextual adaptation. In the third wave, instead of learning from data, intelligent machines will understand and perceive the world on its own, and learn by understanding the world and reason with it. Neuro-symbolic AI, which combines neural networks with symbolic representations, has emerged as a promising solution of the third wave of AI. In this talk, first Houbing Herbert Song will share his journey from counter-unmanned aircraft systems to explainable AI to neuro-symbolic AI. Then he will present the past, present, and future of neuro-symbolic AI. Prof. Song will also share his perspective on the emerging area of neuro-symbolic AI.
Register for the free webinar here. A recording will be available online sometime after the presentation.
Whether you’re just beginning to explore generative AI or already building confidence, each episode meets you where you are. We’re all navigating how to learn and teach with this evolving technology, and our guests share practical, real-world examples to help you along the way. We hope these conversations inspire you to take your next step, however small, in exploring AI's potential in your own teaching practice.
Episode Lineup
The carefully curated lineup features faculty from diverse disciplines and institutions who understand the caution many faculty (and students) feel about AI. The podcasts, and when they will be available on the Moving the Needle site are:
The series is hosted by:
How to Listen
The first episode is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the AI, Unscripted Podcast Limited Series page. New episodes will be added bi-weekly through December 15th.
Share Your Journey
We invite you to share your own questions, hesitations, or early experiments with AI in teaching. Connect with us on LinkedIn using #AIUnscripted or email your thoughts to aiunscripted@usmd.edu. Your perspective matters, especially if you're just beginning to explore these tools. Your questions and experiences could help shape future resources for faculty across Maryland.
Co-sponsored by the USM Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, the USM Council of University System Faculty, and MarylandOnline.
UMBC professor Aharona Rosenthal has a new paper, Can AI make Hitler cry?, exploring the use of AI in Holocaust education across four generations in Spinger’s AI and Ethics journal. The paper presents an empirical comparison of four generations of Holocaust descendants’ perceptions of AI-generated Holocaust content.
It reveal a generational trust gap, showing that the first and second generations prioritize emotional authenticity and remain skeptical of AI, third- and fourth-generation participants show greater trust in digital platforms and AI-driven tools for Holocaust education. The fourth generation’s use of AI-powered tools, including short-form content on TikTok and Instagram Reels, represents a new mode of Holocaust engagement, but also raises ethical concerns for gamification and the trivialization of trauma. It advocates for a hybrid model that integrates AI with human storytelling and scholarly oversight to ensure responsible Holocaust education.
In 2024, information systems Ph.D. student Ommo Clark penned an opinion piece for BusinessDay Nigeria exploring why many Nigerians diagnose and treat their medical conditions themselves, often turning to unreliable online information.
While the essay was inspired by firsthand experiences in her native country, the impulse to consult “Dr. Google” is a worrying global trend, Clark says, and one that has motivated her Ph.D. work. It’s unlikely that people will stop going online with health questions, so Clark is researching ways that AI could help patients, healthcare providers, public health officials, and content platforms better understand and evaluate the sea of medically related content on the Internet.
Ommo’s efforts were recently recognized when one of her research papers, co-authored with information systems professor Karuna Joshi, won the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Digital Health 2025, held in July in Helsinki, Finland. The paper, titled “Real-Time Detection of Online Health Misinformation using an Integrated Knowledgegraph-LLM Approach,” describes the results of combining two types of AI approaches to tackle the problem of identifying online health misinformation.
Read more about their work in this UMBC News article.
]]>10/1: Dr. Mariann Hawken (Director of Instructional Technology), Google Gemini: AI Tools for Research, Teaching, & Learning
10/8: Brianna Hughes (STEM Reference & Instruction Librarian), Assembling an AI Toolbox: Access-Oriented Approaches to Scholarship and Instruction
10/15: Nina-Simone Edwards, JD (Senior Institute Associate, Institute for Technology Law & Policy), Beyond the Hype: Embedding Ethics in AI Policy for Libraries and Higher Ed
10/22: Jennifer Posada (PhD student, Human-Centered Computing), Making Sense of Data with AI: Lowering Barriers, Expanding Who Participates
10/29: Manas Gaur (Asst. Professor, CSEE), and Yash Saxena (PhD student), Building Trustworthy LLM Agents for Academia through Structured, Interpretable Knowledge Retrieval and Source Attribution
11/5: Roberto Yus (Asst. Professor, CSEE), The Privacy Paradox of GenAI: What It Knows, Why It Matters, and How We Fight Back
11/12: Eric Stokan (Assoc. Professor, Political Science & Director of CS3), Advanced Opportunities with AI and Large Language Models (LLMs): Examples from the Social SciencesUMBC’s Dennise Cardona interviewed Sai Manvitha Nadella, M.P.S. ’25, and Sampath Kumar, M.P.S. ’25, co-founders of AIEdumate and graduates of UMBC’s Data Science Program. AI-Edumate is an AI-powered learning platform born from their capstone project.
Their story highlights how hands-on learning, entrepreneurial resources, and a shared vision for personalized education came together at UMBC. You can watch the interview on YouTube, listen to an audio version, or read a lightly edited transcript.